To understand rakeback, you must first understand rake.
Rake is money that the online poker room makes off of each cash game pot.
At most poker rooms the rake is a small percentage of the pot and is taken only when a hand reaches the flop.
Tournament fees are another form of rake.
All tournaments usually have a fee of about 10% of the buy-in that goes to the poker room.
As you can probably now imagine, poker rooms make a ton of money off of rake. Most typical players average about a thousand dollars of rake a month!
To prove this lets we entered what we think is an average players play for a month into a rakeback calculator.
We supposed that an average player multi-tables about 4 $0.25/$0.50 tables, for maybe an average of 2 hours a day for the month.
What came out was very surprising.
This typical player rakes around $1080 a month!
There are two ways that a poker rooms calculate your rake contribution in cash games.
These methods include the dealt method and the contribution method.
In the dealt method every player who is dealt into a hand splits the rake equally among themselves.
For example, if $0.25 was raked from the pot at a 5-handed table, then $0.05 in rake was contributed by each player.
The contribution method, on the other hand splits the rake amount depending on how much of the money you put into the pot.
For example, if you put a third of the money into the pot, then you are said to have contributed a third of the rake.
So if the pot is $30 and the rake is $1.50, and $10 of the $30 was yours to begin with, then you contributed $0.50 in rake.
Now that we know what rake is we can start to talk about a rakeback.
Rakeback is the amount of the rake that you contributed to the poker room that you earn back as a refund.
Typically rakeback offers are around 30%, but there are some as high as 50%.
If we look at our example from the beginning of the article, the normal player who raked $1080 in a month would receive $324 of this back with a 30% rakeback plan.
Some sites give rakeback daily and some give it monthly.
Regardless of when you receive the rakeback, there is no denying that $324 is a lot of money for the typical player to get back each month!
You might be thinking to yourself that there must be a catch.
Well there isn’t.
The only reason that a lot of players don’t have rakeback accounts is simply because they have never heard of poker rakeback online.
Anyone who knows about rakeback would be crazy to not set up their own rakeback account.
In order to receive rakeback you have to sign up a new account through a rakeback provider.
If you are already signed up at your site of choice you should email your poker room and they will hopefully be able to do something for you.
You might also be thinking, why doesn’t the poker room just lower their rake amounts.
One of the reasons is that not all poker rooms offer rakeback.
This means that the ones that do want to show you how much money you are saving by playing at their poker room and thats why you need to take a good rakebackoffer.
This knowledge would likely be lost if they just lowered the amount of rake they take.
Another reason is that not all players who sign up at the poker room, sign up for a rakeback account.
The poker room makes more money off of the ignorance of these players and doesn’t want to give this money back if they don’t have to.
Signing up for rakeback is the smart thing to do.
You will think so too when you get your first rake refund!
Get rakeback today – Click Here
See how much you can get in poker rakeback with this calculator.